page-one

The following day, the New York Daily News had a huge page-one headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

Virtually since the inception of film — certainly since Thomas Ince invented something called the “shooting script” in the early 1910s, introducing the principles of assembly-line efficiency to the Dream Factory — the practice of screenwriting has been less about singular creation than endless tweaks, second guesses, page-one rewrites and cuts deep and wide enough to give the most ruthless editor pause.

He was a walking headline, a page-one fixture, a TV ratings slam dunk.

Former Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao, now an editorial writer, noted after Mr. Causey’s death: “He clearly had the reporting and writing chops to do other things, but Mike knew just how important the federal government workforce is. Tens of thousands of government employees hung on his words, they knew they could trust him and no amount of page-one bylines could substitute for that.”

I had written a page-one profile of his venture for The Wall Street Journal which began with the question “Is America ready for Ted Turner?”